Presentations

These presentations can be delivered either as self-contained modules or as part of a longer seminar or training course. They are ideal either as "frame breaking" introductions or "frame making" conclusions. All presentations make use of numerous practical examples and can be tailored to show the history of particular industries and individual firms.

Note: Each of the major presentations is PC-based multimedia "show" which can last up to 2 hours, depending on the content selected. Each comprises several modules that allow the content to be directed toward specific topics.

Major Presentations

Why are so many organizations innovative and creative when they begin their lives but become hidebound and conservative as they age? This presentation uses a novel conception of the creative process derived from looking at organizations as natural systems. In the numerous modules that make up this presentation, the ‘ecodynamics’ of leadership and creativity become clear. It shows clearly how successful firms can become ‘scale-bound’ as they grow – operating at progressively higher levels of abstraction. Their processes can work well for some time provided the environment does not change! When it does they may find themselves in territories for which they have no strategic maps and facing risks of which they are unaware. Now they have to ‘rescale’ their organizations, getting back to their innovative roots to find the processes of learning and creativity that they can use to renew themselves. Suggestions are made as to how creative tension can be reintroduced into organizations that have lost their ability to learn. The objective is to create small communities of practice, who can immerse themselves in experimentation at the edges of the organization.

"Learning from the Links: Mastering Management with Lessons from Golf"

(This series of presentations is based on my new book published by The Free Press in 2002.)

Management was, is, and always will be about getting things done. Yet while today the challenge of implementation remains central, we hardly understand the issue at all. My recent research at the Center for Creative Leadership suggests why this is so. Our pervasive "think-then-act" model of the mind does not match the way in which effective people and successful organizations actually work. The implementation of strategy is no different systemically from an athlete performing a complex action. Conscious intentions formed in the brain have to be transformed into unconscious competencies performed by the body. We know the world through our bodies, yet their role is much neglected in management thought. As these presentations make clear, body movement is a resource to the mind and none makes a better resource than the game of golf. Golf instructs us not through concepts, but through structured experience. It teaches us to think strategically about the complex webs of cause-and-effect that lie between thought and action. Golf reminds us of the importance of execution and the danger of letting one’s plans diverge too far from one’s abilities. Golf also inculcates values for living – those common courtesies and sensitivities that underpin all effective groups, from families to teams to companies. Lastly, golf teaches us to live in the present, to stay in the moment, the only place and time where success and happiness can be found.

(a) Beyond the Quick Fix

Many management initiatives, like ‘quick fixes’ in golf, deal with the symptoms of problems without getting to their underlying causes. This is understandable given the intricacies of cause-and-effect in all complex systems, but the unfortunate outcome is often a series of better-before-worse activities. Results may improve briefly as the organization’s attention is focused for a time on a specific issue, but they then deteriorate as the initiative pre-empts the organization’s capacity to respond to new threats and opportunities. The only way to improve the performance of a complex system in a sustainable way is to fix problems at their source and reduce the solutions to organizational habits that don’t require conscious intervention. But this is easier said than done. The worst culprit in most organizations is the annual budgeting process, which compels managers to commit to financial results without necessarily understanding their causal basis. The consequence is often lip service, with the production of financial results that are not only unsustainable, but are often accompanied by outright manipulation, if not falsification. This presentation shows managers how to ‘scale’ their strategies so that the webs of cause-and-effect are uncovered and made meaningful to all those who must participate in their realization.

(b) Remembering the Future

There has been much written about the role of vision in the leadership of organizations, but there has been a good deal of disappointment at our attempts to create them. This presentation shows how images – pictures and feelings – work in all facets of human action, from sports to business and at all levels of organization, from individuals to societies. Expert golfers use images of successful shots from the past to create a compelling image of their next swing. Similarly effective executives make selective use of their organizations’ histories to craft "memories of the future" that pull people toward them. The task of managers is to convert instructions – goals set using words and numbers – into compelling images that are meaningful up and down the entire organizational hierarchy. The result of such effective visions is to focus the collective attention of people on those few priorities that make a real difference to performance. This presentation can be combined with the use of "Visual Explorer", a novel image-based exercise that helps people share with each other all aspects of their hopes and fears for the future.

(c) How Leaders Learn

What and how do leaders learn? Based upon my recent work at the Center for Creative Leadership the evidence is clear. Leadership is a cluster of skills that is learned through special kinds of experience not lectures in classrooms! The skills themselves are complex bundles of perceptions and actions that cannot be learned in abstract. In the workplace the key factors seem to be challenging work assignments, significant bosses and hardships. But what are the fundamental processes and can they be duplicated in development programs? The answer is that they can, but the conditions are demanding. New competencies come only from new sensitivities developed through timely, specific feedback. And creating the commitment and discipline to achieve mastery requires contexts that are often difficult to duplicate.

"Crisis & Renewal: Meeting the Challenge of Organizational Change"

(This series of presentations is based on my 1995 book published by the Harvard Business School Press and reprinted in paperback in 2002.)

This presentation presents a radical view of how all successful organizations evolve and renew themselves, and what managers need to do to lead the revival. It argues that there are often times when managers must create deliberate crises in acts of "ethical anarchy" in order to break the constraints of success. Organizational renewal involves going back to the founding principles of an organization to reconnect the past with the present and restore the excitement and emotional commitment that are often missing from large enterprises. It is the integration of these renewal activities with conventional management practices that allows managers to lead their organizations to new life.

(a) "Boxes and Bubbles: the Management of Change"

Based upon my best-selling Harvard Business Review article, this presentation covers the experiences of the management team of a fast growing, acquisition-oriented conglomerate who were themselves taken over in a wildly over-leveraged buyout on the eve of a serious business recession. The presentation deals with management's reactions to the bewildering world in which they found themselves and how they changed their concepts and their practices to successfully handle the turbulence. The lessons drawn have wide application to all kinds of organizations undergoing rapid, discontinuous change.

(b) "Hunters and Herders - The Challenge of Organizational Renewal"

The nomadic hunting/foraging band, self-organizing and resilient, was mankind's original learning organization and an understanding of their dynamics is directly relevant to organizational issues today. In this presentation, the hunter's egalitarian mode of life is contrasted with that of the herders and their hierarchical structure. The social dynamics and physical contexts which compel hunters to become herders are shown to exist within our modern organizations. The best illustration is that of the venture capital firm, Kleiner, Perkins, Caulfield and Byers in Silicon Valley, who use hunting techniques to ‘manage their luck.’ This leads participants to a new understanding of the requirements for organizational renewal and the difficulties they may encounter on the way.

(c) "Courageous Leadership"

There is growing evidence that human organizations, like many complex living systems, require ongoing challenges if they are continually to renew themselves. This presentation looks at the role that leaders must play in this process of creative destruction. For it is not enough for managers merely to "shake-up" their organizations and then stand outside the process. The defining characteristic of all effective leaders is to be "one of us," to be seen to share a common fate with their followers. It is the heart of what we mean by integrity – for the only purpose that can redeem the process is the renewal of the total system.